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I know it in the physical/medical sense, but all the colleagues I've talked to today (all Brits, all professional linguists) immediately said something along the lines of "tedious" or "boring" when I asked them what they thought a "turgid text" was. One did at least find that meaning in the Longman dictionary.

You could well be right about the confusion with "turbid", which is very much the direction our thinking goes.

I would still maintain that usage on the streets, at least in the UK, is at variance with what the dictionaries say and that it's not just a peculiar aberration of a small, isolated group of translators.